The Jungle eBook

And now he died. Perhaps it was the smoked sausage
he had eaten that morning—­which may have
been made out of some of the tubercular pork that
was condemned as unfit for export. At any rate,
an hour after eating it, the child had begun to cry
with pain, and in another hour he was rolling about
on the floor in convulsions. Little Kotrina, who
was all alone with him, ran out screaming for help,
and after a while a doctor came, but not until Kristoforas
had howled his last howl. No one was really sorry
about this except poor Elzbieta, who was inconsolable.
Jurgis announced that so far as he was concerned the
child would have to be buried by the city, since they
had no money for a funeral; and at this the poor woman
almost went out of her senses, wringing her hands
and screaming with grief and despair. Her child
to be buried in a pauper’s grave! And her
stepdaughter to stand by and hear it said without
protesting! It was enough to make Ona’s
father rise up out of his grave to rebuke her!
If it had come to this, they might as well give up
at once, and be buried all of them together! . . .
In the end Marija said that she would help with ten
dollars; and Jurgis being still obdurate, Elzbieta
went in tears and begged the money from the neighbors,
and so little Kristoforas had a mass and a hearse with
white plumes on it, and a tiny plot in a graveyard
with a wooden cross to mark the place. The poor
mother was not the same for months after that; the
mere sight of the floor where little Kristoforas had
crawled about would make her weep. He had never
had a fair chance, poor little fellow, she would say.
He had been handicapped from his birth. If only
she had heard about it in time, so that she might
have had that great doctor to cure him of his lameness!
. . . Some time ago, Elzbieta was told, a Chicago
billionaire had paid a fortune to bring a great European
surgeon over to cure his little daughter of the same
disease from which Kristoforas had suffered.
And because this surgeon had to have bodies to demonstrate
upon, he announced that he would treat the children
of the poor, a piece of magnanimity over which the
papers became quite eloquent. Elzbieta, alas,
did not read the papers, and no one had told her; but
perhaps it was as well, for just then they would not
have had the carfare to spare to go every day to wait
upon the surgeon, nor for that matter anybody with
the time to take the child.

All this while that he was seeking for work, there
was a dark shadow hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage
beast were lurking somewhere in the pathway of his
life, and he knew it, and yet could not help approaching
the place. There are all stages of being out of
work in Packingtown, and he faced in dread the prospect
of reaching the lowest. There is a place that
waits for the lowest man—­the fertilizer
plant!